


The Handmaid Knight

by ghostwriterofthemachine, GraceEliz



Series: shelter in place [1]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Dystopia, Alternate Universe - The Handmaid's Tale Fusion, Canon Typical Emotional and Mental Suffering, Child Abuse, Darkfic, Gen, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, M for themes, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Pastiche, Slavery, Suicidal Thoughts, The authors regret everything, Violation of Reproductive Rights
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-01
Updated: 2021-03-05
Packaged: 2021-03-11 05:00:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 13,093
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28429665
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ghostwriterofthemachine/pseuds/ghostwriterofthemachine, https://archiveofourown.org/users/GraceEliz/pseuds/GraceEliz
Summary: You listen well and follow my voice, I’ll say. Just you, without a name. Attaching a name attaches you to the world of fact, riskier, more hazardous: who knows what the chances are out there, of survival, yours? I will say you, you, you, like an old Temple song.Youcan mean more than one.You can mean thousands. Can mean a Temple filled with love.I’m not in immediate danger, I’ll say to you.I’ll pretend you can hear me.But it’s no good, because I know you can’t.At the end of the Clone Wars, the Jedi Order fell. Please note that "to fall" does not mean "to be killed."
Series: shelter in place [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2082360
Comments: 40
Kudos: 31





	1. one

**Author's Note:**

> STOP. This is darkfic. We're not kidding, this is very very dark darkfic. You know Handmaiden's Tale? All the grossness of Handmaiden's Tale? Okay, take that and add Palpatine's grossness, and apply it to Jedi! Apply it to children being raised with those ideas in their heads! Please, friends, read the warnings, if you don't want this to go through your eyeholes and into your brains, please turn away now. There are cuddles and comfort coming but this is a story very focused on bad things happening to innocent people who are powerless to stop it. That's not for everyone and that's okay. The back button is a wonderful, glorious tool.

We slept in what had once been the great training hall. The floor of varnished wood, with stripes and circles painted on it, for the spars that were formerly held there; pins for push-pull games were still in place, though the nets were gone. A balcony ran around the room, for the spectators, and I thought I could smell, faintly like an afterimage, the pungent scent of sweat, shot through with the sweet taint of sweets and saber-burn from the watchers, some in robes, some in leathers, others in earrings or spiked hair, every species one could imagine. Dances would have been held here; the music lingered, a palimpsest of unheard sound, an undercurrent of percussion, a forlorn wail, garlands of tissue-paper flowers made by the crechelings, twinkling plasma-lights, powdering the dancers in snowy light.

There was old joy in the room and competition, and expectation, of the things without shape or name in Basic. I remember that yearning, a little, for something always about to happen and was never the same as the people around us there and then, meditation in the creche or the whisper of the future from the Force, all the sensations us children were far too young to appreciate.

We yearned for the future. How did we learn it, such a talent for reaching into life? It was in the air; and it was still in the air, an afterthought, as we tried to sleep, in the basic cots that had been set up in rows, with space between and Suppressing Stones so we could not talk. We had simple sheets as all Jedi once did, and black blankets, old ones with the cog of the GAR. We folded our robes neatly and laid them on the stools at the foot of our beds. The lights were turned down but never out. Aunt Sarai and Aunt Elspe patrolled at night; they had youngling-strength crimson-red sabers hooked on their belts, and only one symbolic grey bracelet.

No blaster, though, even they could not be trusted with blasters. Blasters were for the guards, specially chosen from the Angels, the last of the Guard. The guards weren’t allowed into the Halls unless called, and we weren’t allowed out, except for our walks twice-daily, two by two through the last of the Gardens, enclosed now by Suppressing Stone and plasma beams. The Angels stood outside of it with their white-cortosoid backs to us. If only they would look. If only we could talk to them. Something could be pleaded, we thought, some trade-off, if we only had the Force once more. Talk, news. That was our fantasy.

We learned to whisper without sound, without the Force-bonds. In the semi-darkness we could stretch out our arms, when the Aunts weren’t looking, and touch each other’s hands. We lip-read in Dai Bendu, heads flat on the beds, turned sideways, watching each other’s mouths and missing the closeness of our very-youth in the Force. In this way we exchanged what names we had, from bed to bed:

_Ben. Cal. Siri. Deba. Soka._


	2. two

A chair, a table, a lamp. Above, on the white ceiling, a relief ornament in the shape of the wreaths I half-remember making, and in the center a blank space, like the place in a face where an eye is lost. There must have been a chandelier, once. They’ve removed anything you could tie a rope to.

A window, two white curtains. Under the window, a window seat with a little cushion. When the window is partly open - they only open partly, this far up the skyscrapers - the city air can come in and make the curtains move. I can sit in the chair, or on the window seat, hands folded, fiddling with my cuffs, and watch this, and crave the touch of the Force. Sunlight sometimes comes in too, and falls on the floor, which is wood, in narrow strips, highly polished. I can smell the polish. 

There’s a rug on the floor, oval, of braided rags. This is the sort of touch they like: folkish, made by Jedi, a return to so-called traditional values. I wish I could sense the love that made it. Waste not want not. I am not being wasted, why do I still want?

On the wall above the chair, a picture, framed but with no glass: a watercolour of pretty blue flowers, irises. Flowers are still allowed. Does each of us have the same print, the same chair, the same white curtains, I wonder? Imperial issue?

_“Think of it as being in the army,”_ said Uncle Lydol.

A bed. Single-width, mattress medium-hard, covered in a flocked white spread. Nothing takes place in bed but sleep; or no sleep. I try not to think too much. Like other things now, as my whole life, thought must be rationed. There’s a lot that doesn’t bear thinking about. Meditation can hurt your chances, and I intend to last. I know why there is no glass, why the window barely opens and the transparisteel is stronger than any glass. It isn’t running away they’re afraid of. We wouldn’t get far before they caught our Signatures. It’s those other escapes, the ones you open in yourself, given a cutting edge. A return to the Force.

I miss the Force. I’d like to go home to it.

So. Apart from those small details, this could be a Temple room for visiting Knights, or a room in any rooming-house of former times for those of reduced circumstances. That is who we are now. The circumstances have been reduced; for those of us who still have circumstances.

But a chair, sunlight, flowers: these are not to be dismissed.

_Daieno bika._ Be here with the Force.

I am alive.

I live and I breathe. 

(I feel the flow of the Force in my lungs).

I put my hand out, unfolded, into the sunlight. Where I am is not a prison but a privilege, as Uncle Lydol said, who was in love with either/or.

The chime that measures time is tolling. Time here is measured in chime-bells, as once in the Temple. As in the Temple, there are few mirrors.

I get up out of the chair, advance my feet into the sunlight, in their brown shoes, flat-heeled to save the spine, but not designed for sparring. The short brown gloves are lying on the bed. I pick them up, put them onto my hands, finger by finger, carefully smoothing them up to the edges of my shining cuffs. Everything except the wings around my face is brown: the colour of fertile earth on human-populated planets, which defines us. 

The robes are ankle-length, flowing, gathered into the neat fit over the shoulders, the sleeves are Jaieh-full so as not to catch on the frosty bite of our cuffs. The white wings too are prescribed issue, they are to keep us from seeing, but also from being seen. The cut of the robes are an insult to us, unnoticeable, and only barely understood by us younger generations. I pick up the basket, put it over my arm.

The door of the room - not my room, I refuse to call it my room - is not locked. In fact, it doesn’t even shut properly. I go out into the polished hall, which has a runner down it, dusty-pink, like a carpet for royalty like I have seen on the holotelevision. The carpet bends and goes down the staircase of this two-layered apartment and I go with it, one hand on the bannister, once a tree (what would I be able to feel?), turned in another century, rubbed to a warm gloss. 

There’s a tall clock in the hall which doles out the time, and then the door through to the sitting room that looks how the Master’s rooms may have once looked, with warm tones and hints. A sitting room in which I never sit, but stand or kneel only. At the end of the hall, above the front door to the hall out of the complex, is a fanlight of coloured glass, red and blue. 

There remains a mirror; if I turn my head so that the white wings framing my face direct my vision towards it, I can see it as I descend, round, convex, a pier-glass like the eye of a fish, an myself in it like a distorted shadow, the parody of a Jedi, some fairytale in a brown cloak. 

At the bottom of the stairs is an umbrella stand for the rare occasions the city rains, long rounded rungs of wood curving gently up into hooks like the fronds of an Alderaani Fern. There are several umbrellas in it: Imperial Grey for the Commander, blue for the Commander’s Wife, and the one assigned to me, which is brown. I leave it where it is, because the city-planet is climate controlled, and it only rains at night. I wonder whether or not the Commander’s Wife is in the sitting room. She doesn’t always sit; sometimes I hear her pacing back and forth, a heavy step then a light one, and the soft tap of her cane on the dusty-rose carpet.

I walk along into the kitchen, which carries no smell of polish. Rita is standing at the kitchen table, which has a chipped white surface, smooth like the marbles of the Temple’s pillars. She’s in her usual Null’s dress, which is dull silver-grey. The dress is much like our robes in shape, long and concealing, but with a bib apron over it, and without the white wings and veil. She puts a veil on to go outside, but nobody cares who sees the face of a Null. Her sleeves are rolled up - a far closer fit than my own - showing her brown arms. She’s making bread, throwing the loaves for a final kneading then the shaping. 

Rita sees me and nods, whether in greeting or simple acknowledgement of my presence it’s hard to say, and wiped her floury hands on her apron and rummanges in the kitchen drawer for the token-book. Frowning, she tears out three tokens and hands them to me. Her face might be kindly, if she’d only smile. But the frown isn’t personal: it’s the brown robes she disapproves of, the bastardised image of a Jedi, what it all stands for. She thinks I may be catching, like a disease or bad luck. We didn’t used to believe in luck.

Sometimes I listen outside closed doors, a thing I never would have done in the time before, child though I was. I don’t listen long, because I don’t want to be caught doing it. 

Once, though, I heard Rita say to Cora that she wouldn’t debase herself like that. 

“Nobody asking you,” Cora said. “Anyway, what could you do, _supposing?”_

_“_ Go to the Colonies,” Rita said. _“_ They have the choice. _”_

_“_ With the non-humans, and starve to death and Stars know what all? _”_ said Cora. _“_ Catch you.”

They were shelling peas; even through the almost-closed door I could hear the light clink of the hard peas falling into the bowl. I heard Rita, a grunt or a sigh, of protest or agreement.

“Anyways, they’re doing it for all of us,” said Cora, “or so they say. If I had only slightly more Sensitivity I would of been killed in the - anyway. It’s not that bad. It’s not what you’d call hard work.”

“Better her than me,” Rita said, and I opened the door. Their faces were the way that people’s faces are when they’ve been talking about you behind your back and they think you’ve heard: embarrassed, but also a little defiant, as if it were their right. That day, Cora was more pleasant to me than usual, Rita more surly.

Today, despite Rita’s closed face and pressed lips, I would like to stay here, in the kitchen. Cora might come in, from somewhere else in the apartment, carrying her bottle of Nubian-lemon oil and her duster, and Rita would make caf - in the houses of those of the upper ranks of the Imperial Court, there is real caf - and we would sit at Rita's kitchen table, which is not Rita's any more than my table is mine, and we would talk, like the old Masters or Clones off the fronts I remember, about aches and pains, illnesses, our feet, our backs, all the different kinds of mischief that bodies, like us unruly children, can get up to. 

We would nod our head in punctuation to each other's voices, and be amused in the Force, signaling that yes, we know all about it. We would exchange remedies and meditations, and try to outdo each other in the teasing recital of our physical miseries; gently we would complain, our voices soft and minor-key like the birds in the Fountains. _I know what you mean_ , we'd pulse in the Force. Or, a quaint expression our guards picked up off the more elderly Masters, _I hear where you're coming from_ , as if the voice itself were one of our family, returning from the distant war-fronts. Which it would be, which it is. 

How little patience I used to have for such talk. Now I long for it. At least it was talk; an exchange in the Force. 

Or we would gossip. The Nulls know things, they talk among themselves and with the droids, passing unofficial news from level to level of the city. Like me, they listen at doors, no doubt, and see even with their eyes averted. I've heard them at it sometimes, caught whiffs of their private conversations. _Stillborn, but not like to be Sensitive anyway_ , as though life is not worthy in its own merit. Or, _stabbed her with a knitting needle. Jealousy, eating her up,_ little hints of the Dark eating at our broken family. Or even, _it was some cleaner he used. Worked like a charm, though you'd think she'd tasted it. Must've been that drunk: they found him out all right._

Or I would help Rita make bread, sink my hands into soft warmth that is a bit like living flesh. I hunger to touch something other than cloth or wood, hunger to even brush into the Force. I hunger to be warm. 

My people would be horrified by how cold we are. 

_Tamah qa brok vaversi, ji enoah qa mikodail orhma bika._ Outside it is cold, but we are all warm together here.

There is no warmth now; there can be no warmth. 

But even if I were to ask, even if I were to violate decorum to that extent, Rita would not allow it. She would be too afraid. The Nulls are not supposed to show us compassion. Compassion means to show love, unwarranted, and the Empire does not approve of warmth as the Jedi would be warm. They want us cold, and icy, like the Darkness, and to show compassion only to those humans who have earned it. 

  
  


I take the tokens from Rita’s outstretched hand. They have pictures on them, of the things they can be exchanged for. Eggs, or cheeses, or meats. I place them in the zippered pocket in my belt, where I hold my pass.

“Tell them fresh,” she says. “Not like last time. And a pullet, not an old bird. Tell them who it’s for and they won’t mess around.”

“All right,” I say. I don’t smile; stay Jedi-serene, as if that’s all a Jedi could be. Why tempt her friendship?


	3. three

I go out into the foyer to the exit. I haven’t seen the Commander’s Wife, and I wonder where she is: I do not like to come upon her unexpectedly. Perhaps she’s in the sitting room, knitting scarves for the front lines, her left foot on the footstool because of her arthritis. Onceover, she would have perhaps sought the aid of the Healers in the Temple for it. 

I can hardly believe the Angels have a need for such scarves; anyway, the ones she knits are far more elaborate than those I think I remember from the Clone Wars, where our Masters would knit with us. She doesn’t bother with the star-and-round pattern used by the wives of other Commanders, it’s not a challenge. Trees march along the edges of hers, or birds, or stiff humanoid figures, boy-child and girl-child. They aren’t scarves for grown men, for soldiers, but for children. 

Sometimes I think these scarves aren’t sent to the Angels at all, but unravelled and turned back into balls of yarn to be knitted again and again in their turn. Maybe it’s just something to keep the Wives busy, to give a sense of purpose. It’s good to have small goals easily attained.

What can she possibly envy me?

She doesn’t speak to me, unless she can’t avoid it. I am a reproach to her, an insult, and a necessity.

We stood face-to-face for the first time five weeks ago, when I arrived at this posting. The Guard brought me to the front door. On first days we are permitted the front door, but after that we’re supposed to use the “back”, where we are easier to ignore. Things haven’t settled, it’s too soon, everyone is unsure about our exact status. After a while, they will decide if we get front doors, or back; if the right to be seen is earned, how it is we can earn it. 

Uncle Lydol said he was lobbying for all front. “Yours is a position of honour,” he said. I wonder if this is because he remembers where the Jedi have been pulled down from, and whether he meant it as an insult or twisted compliment. 

The Guard rang the chime for me, but before there was time for someone to hear and walk to answer, the door opened inward. She must have been waiting behind it. I was expecting a Null, but it was her instead, in a long powder-blue house-robe not at all like mine, unmistakeable.

“So, you’re the new one,” she said. She didn’t step aside to let me in, she just stood there in the door blocking the entrance, with me in the hall. She wanted me to feel I could not come in unless she said so. There is push and shove, over such small toeholds as this. 

“Yes,” I said.

“Leave it on the porch,” She said this to the Guard, who was carrying my bag. The bag was brown, a satchel much like the Jedi used to carry; there will be another bag, with a heavier cloak, and a dress or two perhaps, should the Commander wish to show me off. 

The Guard set the bag down, clacked his fist to his breastplate in salute, then I heard him march off down the hidden stairs; I felt as if a protective arm had been lifted away. 

With my head demurely bowed, I could see nothing of her except her cane, her diamond ring glinting on a finger that was once fine and still finely kept, the curved fingernail like a mocking smile.

“You might as well come in,” she said. She turned her back to me and limped down the hall. “Shut the door behind you.” 

I lifted the bag inside, as she’d no doubt intended, then closed the door. I didn’t say anything to her. Uncle Lydol said it was best not to speak unless they asked you a direct question.  _ “Try to think of it from their point of view,” _ he said, twirling his grey bracelet with his nervous smile.  _ “It isn’t easy for them.”  _

“In here,” said the Commander’s Wife. When I got into her sitting room she was already in her chair, left foot on the stool, and real roses in a basket. Her knitting was in a basket on the floor, needles stuck through it. 

I stood in front of her, hands folded into the sweeping folds of fabric hiding my cuffs. They were cold under my fingers. 

“So,” she said. She had a deathstick, and she placed it between her lips and gripped it there while she lit. Her lips were thin, held that particular way with the lines I’ve seen in cosmetics adverts. The lighter was ivory coloured. All deathsticks come off the black market, but they’re not at all hard to come by. There’s always a black market, and there’s always something that can be exchanged. She was then a woman who might bend the rules. But what did I have that I might trade? For me, like liquor and caf, deathsticks are forbidden. 

“So old what’s-his-face didn’t work out,” she said. 

“No, ma’am,” I answered.

She gave what might have been a laugh, then coughed. “Tough luck on him,” she said. “This is your second, isn’t it?”

“Third, ma’am,” I said.

“Not so good for you either,” she said. There was another coughing laugh. “You can sit down. I won’t make a practice of it, but just this time.”

I did sit, on the edge of one of the stiff-backed chairs. I didn’t want to stare, knew better than to appear inattentive; so the marble mantle and the bunches of real fresh flowers were just shadows, then, at the edges of my eyes. There would be time enough.

Now her face was level with mine. I thought I perhaps recognised her. Her hair was blonde, dyed I thought but I know now it is real. Her eyebrows were plucked into surprised-inquisitive lines like of a startled child, her eyelids tired, her eyes the harsh midsummer blue of noon sky in bright sunlight. 

“I want to see as little of you as possible,” she said. “I expect you feel the same way about me.”

I didn’t answer, as a yes would have been insulting and a denial a lie, and Jedi do not lie or hurt.

“I know you aren’t stupid,” she continued. She inhaled, blew out the smoke. “I’ve read your file. As far as I’m concerned, this is a business transaction. If I get trouble I’ll give trouble back, understood?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. 

“Don’t call me ma’am,” she said irritably, “you’re not a Null.”

I didn’t ask what I was supposed to call her, because even without the Force I could see she didn’t want me to call her anything at all. I was disappointed. I wanted, then, to turn her into an older sister, or a motherly figure, someone to try and understand and protect me. The Wife of my previous posting had spent most of her time in her room; the Nulls said she drank. I wanted this one to be different. I wanted to be warm, to think I could like her; but I could see I would never have really liked her, nor she me. 

She put her deathstick out, half-smoked, in a little elaborate glass tray on the lamp table beside her. She did it decisively, a jab and grind, not the genteel series of taps other Wives favoured. 

“As of my husband,” she said, “he’s just that. Mine, my husband. I want that to be perfectly clear, till death do us part. It’s final.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said again, forgetting. They used to have dolls, for us children, that could talk if you pulled a string; I was like one of those set-phrase dolls. She probably longed to slap me. They can hit us, but not with an implement. Only their hands. The Commander’s Wife looked down at her hands, and I remembered where I’d seen her: the holotelevision. She used to be on the choral hour, a singer of cautionary tales, in the early days of the Empire when I was a child. 


	4. four

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A content warning for the themes rampant in this novel and in SW, but especially for the cultural erasure.

I walk down into the speeder bay. In the berth is a Guard - not a Clone Guard, or he might be, I can’t remember their faces anymore - washing the speeder, a very expensive one, a Whirlwind. The driver is polishing it lovingly, with a soft rag. 

He wears the grey uniform of the guard, but his cap is tilted to a jaunty angle, and his sleeves are rolled up to the elbow, showing his forearms. Perhaps he is the son of one of the Clones from the Wars; he looks young enough, his skin brown and muscles strong. Perhaps he is one of the last Clones, the young ones, he looks old enough for that. But nobody can really tell. He could be under sixteen standard or pushing twenty-three standard. 

He has a deathstick hanging from the corner of his mouth, which shows he too has something to trade on the black market.

I know this man’s name: Nick. I know this because I heard Cora and Rita talking about him, and once I heard the Commander call to him: Nick, I won’t be needing the speeder.

He lives here, in this household, in one of the apartments over the speeder-bay. Low status: he hasn’t been issued a woman, and if he’s the son of a Clone he likely never will, and if he is a Clone he certainly never will, given the Empire’s well-known discrimination against them. He acts as if he doesn’t know, or care. Too casual, not demure or servile enough. As they used to say, something smells off; I would like to know how he smells. I miss the smells of living people. I miss the warmth of company and the Force even more. He takes a final drag of the deathstick, then lets it drop and steps on it. He begins to whistle. Then he winks.

I drop my head and turn so the white wings hide my face, and keep walking. He just took a risk, for what? What if I were to report him?

Perhaps it was a test. 

Perhaps he is one of the Emperor’s Eyes.

Once in the street, many staircases down, I stand and wait. I used to be one of the less patient ones, bad at waiting. I stand on the corner and pretend I am one with the Force. A shape, brown like me, a nondescript Knight carrying a basket, reaches me; we peer at each other’s faces. He is the right one.

“May the Force be with you,” he says to me, the accepted greeting among us.

“And the Emperor provide,” I answer, the accepted response cold and ashy in my mouth. 

We turn together down to the shops. We aren’t allowed to go down into the streets except in twos. This is supposedly for our protection, but that is absurd: we are well protected already. The truth is he is my spy, as I am his. If either of us slips through the net on our daily walks, the other will be held accountable.

This man has been my partner for two weeks. I don’t know what happened to the one before. On a certain day she wasn’t there, and he was. It isn’t the sort of thing you ask questions about; there wouldn’t be an answer. We hope she is home. He is a little older and taller than I am, and slender, and he is Ofgleya; his name is Cal. He is one of the lucky ones who still remembers his name from Before. Maybe that isn't lucky at all. 

He walks demurely, hands clasped in front - not a fiddler with his cuffs like I am - in firm sweeping elegant steps like a Jedi should. During our walks he has never said anything less than strictly Imperial, but then, neither have I. He may be Fallen; I can’t take the risk of affection. 

“The war is going well,” he says.

“Praise be,” I reply.

“They’ve defeated more of the rebels, since yesterday.”

“Praise be,” I say. I don’t ask him how he knows. “What were they?”

“Twi’leks, smoked out of Syndulla lands.” 

We are quiet a moment, both praying to the Force to bless their rest. “Praise be.”

Sometimes I wish he would shut up and let us walk in peace. But I am ravenous for news and connection, even false news, because it must mean something. 

We reach the first barrier, which is much like the barriers used to block of building work in the city, the symbols that mean Stop. Near the gate are lanterns, not lit because it isn’t quite dark enough here. Above, I know, attached to the buildings, are floodlights for use in emergencies, and there are men with blasters stationed at intervals. I can’t see the lights and guards because of the wings around my face; but I know they are there. 

Behind the barrier that cordons off the streets where no-one except the Knights may shop, waiting for us, are two men in the grey uniforms of Guardians with the Imperial crest in green on their shoulders and berets: not real soldiers, like the armoured Guards. They’re used for routine policing and other menial functions, and they’re usually older or younger or unfit for front-lines, apart from the ones who are Eyes incognito. They are young like me, but the young ones are the most dangerous, the most fanatical, the jumpiest with their guns. We have to go slowly with them. 

Last week they shot a woman, about here. A Null, fumbling for her pass, and they thought she had a bomb. They thought she was a rebel in disguise. There have been such incidents. 

Rita and Cora knew the woman. I heard them talking about it in the kitchen.

“Doing their job,” said Cora. “Keeping us safe.” 

“Nothing safer than dead,” said Rita, angrily. “She was minding her own business. No call to shoot her.”

“It was an accident,” said Cora.

“Like the Purge,” I wanted to demand of them, “an accident like the loss of our culture?” 

“No such thing,” said Rita. “Everything is meant.” I could hear her thumping pots around in the sink.

“Well, someone’ll think twice about blowing up this building, anyways,” said Cora.

“All the same,” said Rita. “She worked hard. That was a bad death.” 

“I can think of worse,” said Cora. “At least it was quick.”

“You can say that,” said Rita. “I’d choose to have some time, before, to set things right.”

I knew that they were remembering the Purge. Nobody can forget the smell of the burning dead, the leaked images. 

The two young Guardians salute us, raising three fingers to the rims of their hats. Such tokens are accorded to us. They are supposed to show us respect, because of the nature of our service. We produce our passes, and they are inspected and stamped. One man taps our numbers into his datapad. 

In returning my pass, the pale one bends his head to try and get a look at my face. I raise my head a little, to help him, and he sees my eyes and I see his, and he blushes. I miss the warmth of connection in the Force, the days when I would have smiled at the soft flow of embarrassment against my shields. He is the one who turns away first.

It’s an event, a small defiance of rule, so small as to be undetectable, but such moments are the rewards I hold out for myself, like sweets from Jeiah Windu when we were children. I remember being very small and crying at the injustice of not being able to eat my fill of the treats; we were cared for, nurtured, protected from overindulgence as opposed to not being given the chance as it is now. Such moments are possibilities, tiny peepholes. 

What if I were to come at night, to talk, to converse beyond a script? Is it what they think about, as they stand endlessly beside the barriers through which nobody ever comes except us, and the Nulls, or the occasional hum of the blad speeder-vans above. The black speeders are surely more silent than any other speeder. When they pass, we avert our eyes. If they are close, and we hear sounds, we try not to hear. When the black speeders reach the floating checkpoints they’re waved straight through without pause. 

The Guardians - and Guards - would not want to take the risk of looking inside, searching, doubting their authority. Or whatever they would think, if they do think; you can’t tell by looking at them. If they do think of conversation, or more likely, of the physical, of kissing perhaps, they must think of the floodlights, of blaster shots. They think of doing their duty and being promoted and being allowed possibly to marry, and if they gain the Emperor’s favour, of being allotted a Knight of their own.

They open the gate for us, and stand well back as we pass through. As we walk away I feel them watching us, these two men who aren’t permitted to touch or even talk to the Knights - the most ancient of forbidden fantasies. 


	5. five

Doubled, we walk down the street. The street is mostly empty, quiet, like a model street to show how people live, stripped of activity. This is the heart of the Empire, where wars cannot intrude except on holotelevision. Where exactly the edges are we aren’t sure, they vary, but the Empire is a machine and this is the center.  _ The Empire _ , said Uncle Lydol,  _ knows no bounds. You carry it within you.  _

We turn the corner onto the main street where there is more traffic. There are others with baskets, some in robes, some in grey, some in the shabby dress of the lower classes. You don’t see the Spouses down here, on the streets where we go. They inhabit much higher levels.

The sidewalk is paved. Like a child, I avoid placing my feet on the cracks. 

I’m remembering my feet on these sidewalks in the time before, in little practical boots, running and dancing or strutting with child-serenity with my crechemates and Master. We were not protected like this, then, I don’t think. I remember the rules: do not stray, do not wander, check the Force to know who to trust, and I remember peering around white-cortosoid legs and flowing robes in curiosity. People used to talk to us, greet us with smiles or sometimes with sneers but mostly with smiles. 

Now we walk the same street in brown pairs, and nobody talks to us at all. 

“There is more than one type of freedom,” said Uncle Lydol, parroting things someone else told him. “Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don’t underrate it.”

To the left is the shop where we can apply for new robes. Some people call them habits, a good word for them. Habits are hard to break. We don’t go in.

Our first stop is at a store with another wooden sign: three eggs, a bee, a cow. Milk and Honey. There's a line, and we wait our turn, two by two. Lines of brown robes.

I see they have a certain type of fruit, native to a mid-rim world, today. They’ve been hard to get, since the war ended. Many of the farms were destroyed in the fighting. Both sides wanted the planet, for where it was in trade routes. I remember the fruits being tangy and crisp. I remember one of the knights — a real, proper knight — brought us children some of them when we still fought. 

I look at the fruit , longing for one. But I haven't brought any coupons for them. I'll go back and tell Rita about them, I think. She'll be pleased. It will be something, a small achievement, to have made those fruits happen, to have brought something of joy for someone. That’s what we used to do, the proper knights. We used to help people. We used to make people happy, in ways that didn’t use us up. 

Those who've reached the counter hand their tokens across it, to the two men in Guardian uniforms who stand on the other side. Nobody talks much, which is a rule, though there is a rustling, and the Knights heads move furtively from side to side: here, shopping, is where you can see others like you, see those who would have been your family. You might even see someone you know, someone you've known from the Temple, before or after it changed. Just to catch sight of a face like that is an encouragement. Seeing any of the other’s faces is encouragement. 

We see each other, and know we exist. We are united in our station, even if we can never touch or speak, physically or through the Force. We know that the others still exist. The possibility of family. Of warmth.

It's hard to imagine now, having any of that.

But Cal— and I chant his name in my head like defiance, because I remember it and that is so rare, I know this man as Cal and I call him as such — beside me, isn't looking. Maybe he doesn't know anyone anymore. Maybe, if he does, he doesn’t want to see. It’s harder on the older ones, like Cal. They remember Before better. They remember us before we were like this, even if we do not remember ourselves. Maybe he can’t stand the sight of us. Or maybe he doesn't want to be seen. 

He stands in silence, head down.

As we wait in our double line, the door opens and two more knights come in, both in the brown robes and white wings. One of them is vastly pregnant; her belly, under her loose garment, swells. It hinders how she walks. She does not walk with Jedi-grace anymore. She nearly shuffles. There is a shifting in the room, a murmur— of something, despair, hope, some twisted punch of both— and an escape of breath.

We are torn, between mourning and envy. Between crying out for what has happened to her, and thinking longingly of the privileges she’s now allowed. 

The cuffs are bad for the babies. They let you out of the cuffs, just a little, when you’re bearing. 

She’s a flag on a hilltop, of both victory and warning.

We all know that she is being displayed; there’s no reason for a pregnant Knight to walk outside. The daily walk is no longer prescribed, to keep her abdominal muscles in working order, to keep her fit and looking like a Jedi.

From the mummers going up and down the lines, the display has had the desired effect.

"Quiet," says one of the Guardians behind the counter, and we fall silent on command.

Cal and I have reached the counter. We hand over our tokens, and one Guardian enters the numbers on them while the other gives us our purchases — the milk, the eggs. We put them into our baskets and go out again, past the pregnant Knight and her partner, who beside her looks spindly, shrunken; as we all do. As does she, behind the aching swell of her body. Her hands rest on it as if to defend it, the way we were once supposed to defend things, with bright swords and swift bodies which did not only exist to swell or cause swelling. Maybe she is gathering something from it, a family within her, warmth and strength. They say you can feel it, in the Force, when something grows within you.

As I pass she looks full at me, into my eyes, and I know who she; is. She was at the Temple with me. Her name, in the time before, was Janine. I call her that in my head —  _ Hello, Janine _ .

Janine looks at me. She glances down to where my own belly lies flat under my brown robes. I can see only a little of her forehead, and the pinkish tip of her nose.

Next we go into All Flesh, which is marked by a large wooden pork chop hanging from two chains. There isn't so much of a line here: meat is expensive, and even the Commanders don't have it every day. Cal gets steak, though, and that's the second time this week. I'll tell that to the Nulls: it's the kind of thing they enjoy hearing about. They are very interested in how other households are run; such bits of petty gossip give them

an opportunity for pride or discontent.

I take the chicken, wrapped in butcher's paper and trussed with string. I let my fingers run over the sting. 

I remember being very young, warm in the Creche, playing games with plain strings like this. Force games; meant, I see now, to help us hone our control and precision. 

_ Can you lift it from the center? One end, and then the other? Can you pull it away from your friend? Set it on your friend’s head? Oh, oh, little one, can you tie it in a knot? _

I remember, on the last day before everything ended, that I did that. I tied the string into a knot. 

I remember trying to do the same thing, to yank blasters out of used-to-love-us hands. That, I had not been able to do. 

A group of people is coming towards us. They look, perhaps, like refugees. Twi’leks, maybe from Ryloth, being led by a chattering human. The Twi’leks seem to be a family unit, hands on shoulders, a child safe in a caretaker’s arms. They lean together, easily touching, obviously unsure in their surroundings but sure in each other’s presence. The mother is wearing a dress, simple and practical and soft, and the child is kept warm in a blanket I can nearly taste the love of.

They stare at us, come to a halt at our presence. I stop walking. Cal stops beside me and I know he too cannot take his eyes off the family. We are entranced. It has taken so little time for us to forget that warmth and unity. They come towards us, trilling, and we turn away too late; they have seen our faces.

There’s an interpreter, human, in a standard style of suit and red tie with the pin in it. He’s the one who steps forward out of the group, in front of us, blocking our way. The refugees bunch behind him; one raises a camera. They might be rebels trying to get holos of us. They might not, might just be curious.

“Excuse me, they’re asking if they can take your picture.”

I look down at the sidewalk, shake my head for no. What they must see is the white wings only, a scrap of face. I know better than to look the interpreter in the face. Most of them are Eyes, or so it’s said.

_ Modesty is invisible, _ said Uncle Lydol,  _ never forget it. To be seen is to be - _ his voice trembled.  _ What you must be, children, is impenetrable, shielded. _

Beside me Cal is also silent. He’s tucked his brown-gloved hands up his sleeves to hide them, and the cuffs: he looks like a Jedi.

The interpreter turns back to the group, chatters at them in Ryl. I know what he’ll be saying, I know the line. He’ll be telling them that we have different customs, that to holopic us would be a violation, against our beliefs. 

“Excuse me,” the interpreter says again, to catch our attention. I nod to show I am listening. “They want to know if you are happy.”

Cal says nothing. There is a silence. But sometimes it’s as dangerous not to speak.

“Yes, we’re very happy,” I murmur. I have to say something. What else can I say?


	6. six

A block past All Flesh, Cal pauses, as if hesitant about which way to go. We have a choice. We could go straight back, or we could take the long way around. We already know which way we will take, because we always take it. 

“I’d like to pass by the memorial,” he says, as if piously.

“All right,” I say, though I know as well as he does what he’s really after.

We walk sedately. The sun is out, in the sky there are white fluffy clouds, the kind that look like puffs of unprocessed wool. Given our wings, our blinkers, it’s hard to look up, hard to get a full view, of the sky, of anything. But we can do it, a little at a time, a quick move of the head, up and down, to the side and back. We have learned to see the world in gasps.

The memorial is a small one, one of the first, not enough years ago to start looking worn. It has a little museum, images of Jedi demure and deified, long sombre outfits, brown-clothed. Admission is free.

We don’t go in, though, but stand on the path, looking at the plaques of name and number. They haven’t fiddled these plaques, the closest there is to a Jedi graveyard. That would be too far even for them.

Cal’s head is bowed as if he’s praying. He does this every time. Maybe, I think, there’s someone in particular gone - his Jaieh, maybe, because he’s old enough to have had one, or one of our once-protectors. Sometimes I think he does everything for the image, hiding in plain sight, out to look good and make the best of it. But then, that is what I must look like, too. How can it be otherwise?

Now we turn our backs on the memorial and there is another thing that is not how it once was: the Wall.

The Wall is as old as the rest of the Temple. It used to protect us, unpassable, and even if it was passed, the Sentinels would protect us, and our Crechemasters, and for that brief time the white soldiers who loved us as we loved them. Or we thought they did. Now, no-one goes past the Wall willingly, no one enters the ancient halls. There are ugly floodlights, and plasma-beams, and alarm systems.

Beside the gate are six new bodies hanging, by the necks, their hands tied in front of them, their heads in white bags tipped sideways on their shoulders. There must have been a Traitor's Example early this morning. I didn’t hear the bells. Perhaps I’ve become used to them.

We stop, together as if on signal, and stand and look at the bodies. It doesn't matter if we look. We're supposed to look: this is what they are there for, hanging on the Wall. Sometimes they'll be there for days, until there's a new batch, so as many people as possible will have the chance to see them. They smear death on the face of what was once our home.

What they are hanging from is hooks. The hooks have been set into the brickwork of the Wall, for this purpose. Not all of them are occupied.

They are several species, though mostly they are non-humans. Some wear white coats, like those worn by doctors or scientists. Others are dressed in flight suits like pilots. Blacks like soldiers. Each has a placard hung around their neck to show why they have been executed. For all of them, it is treason. 

What others are supposed to feel towards these bodies is hatred and scorn. What us, the Knights, are supposed to feel is despair. For the slaughter, for the lives snuffed out. For the brutality we once could have defended them from. 

This isn't what I feel. These bodies hanging on the Wall are time travelers, anachronisms. They've come here from the past.

What I feel towards them is blankness. What I feel is that I must not feel. Because to feel blank means that they are washing me out of myself, leaving only the empty vessel for our new masters to fill. 

Beside me, I feel Cal tremble. Is he crying? In what way could it make him look good? I can't afford to know, My own hands are clenched, I note, tight around the handle of my basket.

“Ordinary,” said Uncle Lydol, “is what you are used to. This may not seem ordinary to you now, but after a time it will. It will become ordinary.”


	7. seven

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mentions of pills, drugs, memory alterations, all to a child :(

The night is mine, my own time, to do with as I will, as long as I am quiet. As long as I don't move. As long as I lie still. They used to teach us stillness in meditation, inner calm, reaching for inner peace. Feeling the Force hold you like a child and teach you all the things it has to teach. There are lots of ways to meditate, or at least there were back then. Standing or sitting. Even moving, to find inner stillness. Even lying down.

I lie, then, inside the room, under the plaster eye in the ceiling, behind the white curtains, between the sheets, and step sideways out of my own time. Out of time. 

But the night is my time out. Where should I go?

Someplace safe. Someplace warm.

Master Kenobi comes to help in creche lessons, when he is home from the war. He sits, larger than life among us, and moves his hands while he talks. 

A rainbow of pebbles follow his hands, swirling in the air, making circles and hearts and other silly shapes. We watch, enraptured. 

“Now, get ready to catch them,” he says, and floats them toward us. We are all delighted by this control, and hold out our hands for the stones to fall into our palms. 

“Alright,” he says, so gentle, so kind, “lift that one yourselves. I bet you all can do it.”

  
  


Or perhaps in the city, out somewhere with our armoured guards with the red-on-white armour, paint in the shapes of our hands, scawls up their legs of crayon and ink. How old was I? It was cold, our breaths came out in front of us, there were no leaves left on the trees in the Alderaani garden; greyed sky, disconsolate. We were going to visit the library. 

There were some people burning books, we saw, and our white protectors put their helmets on and marched off to help, because that was what they did, kept the peace. Kept us safe. 

I turned away, sulking at having one of my favourite friends gone, but the fire drew me back. The flames shot high, and then they began piling flimsi on from boxes. People chanted, and cheered, and the Guard were red-fire trying to make it stop. 

Their faces were happy, ecstatic almost. Fire can do that. I must have strayed, because there was a woman, her skin made flush by firelight, and she handed one to me and asked if I wanted to throw it on. How old was I?

Then there was Fox, and I remember it must have been Fox, because he was always the largest, and reddest, back when we could feel these things, and he picked me up and took me to my crechemates and told us not to look.

But then what happens? Then what happens?

I know I lost time.

There must have been Suggestions, dampeners, needles or pills, something like that. I wouldn’t have lost that much time without help.  _ You have had a shock, _ they said. 

I would come to with dull roaring confusion. I remember feeling quite calm. I can remember screaming, it felt like screaming,  _ what have you done with us? What have you done to them? _

There was no light or day, only flickering. After a while there were chairs and beds and the window. 

_ They’re in good hands, _ they soothed, so much larger than I, _ you want what is best with them, don’t you? _

They showed me a picture, but I didn’t know who it was, because the armour was wrong, and all white, and all of ours had red paint and handprints and crayon-scrawls.

_ You killed them, _ I said, and I know now I was right, even though I was a child. 

I would like to believe it is a story I am telling. I need to believe it. I must believe it. Those who can believe and have hope stand a better chance.

If it’s a story I’m telling, I have control over the ending. Then there will be an ending, to the story, and real life will come after. I can pick up where we left off. 

It isn’t a story I’m telling. 

It’s also a story I’m telling, in my head, as I go along. 

Tell, rather than write, because I have nothing to write with and writing is, in any case forbidden. But if it’s a story, even in my head, I must be telling it to someone. You don’t tell a story only to yourself. There’s always someone else, always the Force. 

You listen well and follow my voice, I’ll say. Just you, without a name. Attaching a name attaches you to the world of fact, riskier, more hazardous: who knows what the chances are out there, of survival, yours? I will say you, you, you, like an old Temple song. You can mean more than one. 

You can mean thousands. Can mean a Temple filled with love.

I’m not in immediate danger, I’ll say to you.

I’ll pretend you can hear me. 

But it’s no good, because I know you can’t. 


	8. eight

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've been waiting for this one - Tevya, enjoy!

The good weather holds, as much as it always holds on a planet that is only a city. There are three new bodies on the Wall. Three more traitors. One is a Rodian, dressed as an industry worker. The two others are Ithorian. I wish I could see their faces. I wonder if I would recognize any of them.

"We should go back," I say to Cal. I'm always the one to say this. Sometimes I feel that if I didn't say it, he would stay here forever, staring at the Temple. Looking at the bodies. But is he mourning or gloating? I still can't tell.

I wish the cuffs were off. I could tell then. Well. I could do a lot of things then.

Without a word, he swivels, as if he’s voice-activated, as if he’s on little oiled wheels, as if he’s on top of a music box. 

I resent this grace of his, how obvious it is that he spent more time training (not Training, no, not that) than I, how much closer he is to what we should be. I resent his meek head, bowed as if onto a heavy wind. But there is no wind.

I want him to reach out to me. I want him to lift his head and pronounce he has a brilliant plan of escape. I want him to stop looking as broken as I do.

We leave the Wall, walk back the way we came.

"It's a beautiful day," Cal says. As he does it, he smoothly gestures his hand in front of him. He’s holding his fingers in an odd position. I feel, rather than see, his head turn towards me, waiting for a reply.

"Yes," I say. "Praise be," I add as an afterthought. 

When we used to fight, before and during the war, there were hand signs we would use to talk without talking. C _ ome here, stay back, all clear, danger ahead, _ all without opening our mouths.

I can remember sitting crossed-legged with members of that Guard, their large, broad hands flicking through the air.

“Do you know what this means?” they’d ask, signing out ‘ _ Stay hidden. _ ’ 

“What about this one?” they sign something that looks almost like the motion Cal just made.

“This one is a very important sign,” they say, and then they tell us what it means.

_ Help me _ .

  
  


Coming towards us there's a small procession, a funeral: three women, each with a black transparent veil thrown over her head. Their striped dresses are worn-looking, as are their faces.  _ Some day when times improve,  _ said Uncle Lydol,  _ no-one will have to be one of them.  _

The first one is the bereaved, the mother; she carries a small black mourning-jar. We pause out of respect while they go by. I wonder if Cal feels what I do, a pain, like a stab in the belly, or if he feels it elsewhere, his heart perhaps. We put our hands over our hearts to show these stranger women that we feel with them for their loss. Beneath the veil the first one scowls at us. One of the others turns aside, spits on the sidewalk. Many people do not like us. 

  
  


We go past the shops and come to the barrier again, and are passed through. We continue along the street, under the shadows of the high-class skyscrapers. At the corner of the building where I'm posted, Cal stops, turns to me. 

"Glory to the Empire," he says. The right farewell, not the one in my heart. Force be with you. 

"Glory to the Empire," I reply, and he gives a little nod. He hesitates, as if to say something more, but then he turns away and walks down the street, sedate and collected. I watch him. It's like watching my own reflection, in a mirror from which I am moving away. 

In the speeder bay, Nick is polishing the speeder again. He's reached the chrome at the back. I put my gloved hand on the rail, catching my breath. 

Nick looks up and begins to whistle. Then he says, "Nice walk?" 

I nod, but do not answer with my voice. He isn't supposed to speak to me.  _ Of course some of them will try,  _ said Uncle Lydol.  _ All is weak.  _ All is the Force, I corrected him in my mind.  _ They can't help it,  _ he said,  _ the Force made them that way but it did not make you that way. It made you different. It's up to you to set boundaries. Later you will be thanked.  _

In the big front room of the house, the Commander’s Wife is watching a holobroadcast. I try not to look at it. They don’t like us watching things, same way that they don’t like us reading. 

She’s watching the news, something with the Emperor standing in front of a big building, talking to lots of people. I’ve seen it many times before, and I always try not to watch. 

This time, though, I pause, because it’s not just the Emperor standing in front of the people. There are people on his right, and people on his left. 

To his right is Lord Vader, and his family. Lord Vader has golden yellow eyes and a long, dark cape. His wife is next to him in a blood-red gown. His children are not there. 

Everyone knows that Vader’s children are bright with the Force, but they are Other from us in ways we have never been told. We used to guess, under cover of darkness and in whispers, why they got to be safe, while we got to be Knights. Maybe we had done something bad. Maybe Vader’s children did something to earn that freedom. The rumor in the dormitories was that they didn’t even need to wear the cuffs, a concept so forgen to us it might as well have been fairytale.

(The older of us pressed their lips together, and never really answered.)

But even Vader is a common enough presence. I am caught and transfixed by the people standing behind him and to the left.

The Duchess of Mandalore used to be a more beautiful woman, but now her face is scarred and her hair is shorn short on one side. She is featureless as marble, equally as cold.

And next to her is a figure in brown robes, white wings concealing a ducked face. Arms tucked into his wide sleeves to hide the glint of his beautiful cuffs, a parody of the pose we saw so often, a mockery of the strongest person we could imagine. 

I remember Master Kenobi as the pinnacle of the Order, all of our dreams and aspirations rolled into one. The person who might choose us as a Padawan, the greatest of all the possible future Jaieh, and everything we all wanted to be when we grew up.

I look down at my robes and think about how, in a way, I got that last wish.

At last, she sees me, hovering in the doorway. I do not drop my eyes fast enough, and she sees where I was looking. 

“What, did you know that one?” She correctly guesses what entranced me, and I am too startled to even be angry at her for it. “Before you all got what comes to traitors?”

I don’t say anything. She doesn’t want an answer anyway. I bow and hurry myself out of the room. 

_ “It's not the husbands you have to watch out for, _ ” said Uncle Lydol, “ _ it's the Wives. You should always try to imagine what they must be feeling. Of course they will resent you. It is only natural. Try to feel for them.” _ Uncle Lydol, all the aunts and uncles really, were big on telling us to feel for people like that.  _ “Try to pity them.” _

The wife’s voice follows me out. “I hear him and the Broken Duchess are trying for a second.”

I walk through the door, set my basket down on the kitchen table. The table has been scrubbed off, cleared of flour; today's bread, freshly baked, is cooling on its rack. The kitchen smells of yeast. It reminds me of other kitchens. It smells of family; it smells like being small and laughing as our crèchemasters showed us how to roll our hands in the dough.

This is a treacherous smell, and I know I must shut it out, but today I find myself craving it. Reaching towards it. I feel raw on the inside. 

Rita is there, sitting at the table, peeling and slicing carrots. The knife she uses is sharp and bright, and tempting. I would like to have a knife like that.

Rita stops chopping the carrots, stands up, takes the parcels out of the basket, almost eagerly. She looks forward to seeing what I've brought, although she always frowns while opening the parcels. Nothing I bring fully pleases her. She's thinking she could have done better herself. She would rather do the shopping, get exactly what she wants; she envies me the walk. 

I envy many things, too. 

"They've got that fruit," I say. "The one you like. At Milk and Honey. There are still some left." I hold out this idea to her like an offering. I wish to ingratiate myself. I am, suddenly, starving for — something, anything. Praise. Contact. A kind look, a kind word, kind, kind, kindness — "I could get some tomorrow, if you'd give me the tokens for them." 

I hold out the chicken to her. Rita grunts, not revealing pleasure or acceptance. She'll think about it, the grunt says, in her own sweet time. 

She undoes the string on the chicken, and the glazed paper. She prods the chicken, flexes a wing, pokes a finger into the cavity, fishes out the giblets. The chicken lies there, headless and without feet, goose pimpled as though shivering.

"Bath day," Rita says, without looking at me.

Cora comes into the kitchen, from the pantry at the back, where they keep the mops and brooms. "A chicken," she says, almost with delight.

"Scrawny," says Rita, "but it'll have to do."

"There wasn't much else," I say. I speak. I defend myself. Rita ignores me.

"Looks big enough to me," says Cora. Is she standing up for me? I look at her, to see if I should smile, should talk, should reach back; but no, it's only the food she's thinking of.  _ Look at me _ , I think.  _ Look at me. _

She's younger than Rita; the sunlight, coming slant now through the west window, catches her hair, parted and drawn back. She must have been pretty, quite recently. 

"Tall," says Rita, "but bony. You should speak up," she says to me, looking directly at me for the first time. Her eyes burn my skin. "Ain't like you're common." 

She means the Commander's rank. She means the cuffs on my wrists and the power I cannot touch. But in the other sense, her sense, she thinks I am very common. She is over sixty, her mind's made up.

She goes to the sink, runs her hands briefly under the tap, dries them on the dishtowel. The dishtowel is white with blue stripes. Dishtowels are the same as they always were. Sometimes these flashes of normality come at me from the side, like ambushes. I remember our protectors teaching us about ambushes. I remember being ambushed.

"Who's doing the bath?" says Rita, to Cora, not to me. I want her to talk to me. "I got to tenderize this bird."

"I'll do it later," says Cora, "after the dusting."

"Just so it gets done," says Rita.

They're talking about me as though I can't hear. I can, though. I do. I hate how much I want them to be talking  _ to _ me, instead. 

I've been dismissed. I pick up the basket, go through the kitchen door and along the hall. I follow the dusty-pink runner down the long upstairs hallway, back to the room. 

There's someone standing in the hall, near the door to the room where I stay. The hall is dusky, this is a man, his back to me; he's looking into the room, dark against its light. I can see now. It's the Commander.

He isn't supposed to be here. He hears me coming, turns, hesitates, walks forward. Towards me. He is violating custom — what do I do now?

I stop, he pauses. I can't see his face, he's looking at me, what does he want? 

But then he moves forward again, steps to the side to avoid touching me, inclines his head, is gone.

Something has been shown to me, but what is it? Like the flag of an unknown country, seen for an instant above a curve of hill. It could mean attack, it could mean parley, it could mean the edge of something, a territory. The waves you can send another person through the Force.

A flash of bared teeth. What in hell does he think he's doing? Nobody else has seen him. I hope. Was he invading? Was he in my room?

Oh.

I called it mine.


	9. nine

My room, then. There has to be some space, finally, that I claim as mine, even in this time.

I'm waiting, in my room, which right now is a waiting room. When I go to bed, it's a bedroom. I wish my windows had curtains. I am trying not to tell stories, or at any rate not this one.

Someone has lived in this room, before me. Someone like me, one of my people. Maybe someone I knew, before all this began. I like to think it so. I like to think I am touching the things that someone like me used to touch, sleeping in the bed someone like me used to sleep in. Touch removed, but touch all the same.

I discovered that touch three days after I was moved here. I had a lot of time to pass. I decided to explore the room, slowly, like unfolding something soft. Like moving through— what was that kata? The one where you began on your knees, and folded yourself upward like a flower. I don’t remember.

So. I explored this room, slowly, as if I could find peace in it. I didn't want to do it all at once. I wanted to make it last. I divided the room into sections, in my head; I allowed myself one section a day. This one section I would examine with the greatest minuteness: the unevenness of the plaster under the wallpaper, the scratches in the paint of the baseboard and the windowsill, under the top coat of paint, the stains on the

mattress, for I went so far as to lift the blankets and sheets from the bed, fold them back, a little at a time, so they could be replaced quickly if anyone came in.

We used to sleep in piles, in the creche. That is a memory that time, or pills, or shocks, or anything else has not dimmed. We slept in piles of pillows and blankets and all of our shields tumbled down because they hadn’t been properly put up yet, and we’d sink into the Force and feel each other in it, and fall asleep on top of one another.

I saved the cupboard until the third day. I looked carefully over the door first, inside and out, then the walls with their brass hooks — how could they have overlooked the hooks? Why didn't they remove them? Too close to the floor? But still, a stocking, that's all you'd need. And the rod with the plastic hangers, my robes hanging on them, all shades of tan and brown. 

I knelt to examine the floor, and there it was, in tiny writing, quite fresh it seemed, scratched with a pin or maybe just a fingernail, in the corner where the darkest shadow fell:  _ uu nev valrael keel tamah, im xariel _ .

It was written in the script that our language is supposed to be written in, and it takes me too much time to decipher it, because I wasn’t allowed to finish learning. I know this phrase, though. I know what this says.

_ You are in the dark, not the Darkness. _

You say that to people who need comforting. You say that to people so they know they are strong enough to get through, that there is hope even if they can’t see it.

It pleases me to ponder this message. It pleases me to think I'm communing with them, this unknown sibling of mine. That, over the span of time and distance and maybe death ( _ but there is no death, there is— _ ), we are passing words of comfort to each other. It sparks something blessedly warm in my chest.

For they are unknown; or, if known, they have never been mentioned to me. It pleases me to know that her taboo message in our forbidden language made it through, to at least one other person, washed itself up on the wall of my cupboard, was opened and read by me. Sometimes I repeat the words to myself. They give me a small joy. I am not sure if they give me hope, but I like to pretend they do. 

When I imagine the Jedi ( _ Jedi, Jedi, not a Knight— _ ) who wrote them, I think of them as about my age, maybe a little older. I turn them into my memories of the younger knights from before all of this. An easy laugh, I think; irreverent, resourceful. Knight Secura or Knight Mano. 

I wonder who they were or are, and what's become of them. I tried that out on Rita, the day I found the message. 

“Who was the knight who stayed in that room?” I said. “Before me?” 

If I'd asked it differently, if I'd said, “Was there a knight who stayed in that room before me?” I might not have got anywhere. 

“Which one?” she said; she sounded grudging, suspicious, but then, she almost always sounds like that when she speaks to me. 

So there have been more than one. Some haven't stayed their full term of posting, their full two years. Some have been sent away, for one reason or another. Or maybe not sent; gone? Maybe they Fell. Maybe they died. 

“You know her?” Rita asked, more suspicious than ever, but I rejoice— a pronoun, now I have a pronoun! 

“I knew her before,” I lied. “I heard she was here.” 

Rita accepted this. She knows there must be a grapevine, an underground of sorts. 

“She didn't work out,” she said. 

“In what way?” I asked, trying to sound as neutral as possible. 

But Rita clamped her lips together. 

I am like a child here, though it has been so very long since I felt like a child, I was never even a Padawan — but still, there are some things I must not be told. 

“What you don't know won't hurt you,” was all she would say. 


	10. ten

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> guess who just watched the clone wars finale for the first time and is sobbing into the mattress

It’s warm for the time of year. Apartments like this heat up in the sun, there’s not enough insulation. Around me the air is stagnant, despite the little current, the breath coming in past the curtains. I’d like to be able to open the window as wide as it could go. Perhaps I will be allowed to wear something thinner.

I remember, back at the Temple, we didn’t need to wear robes all the time. Mostly, we could wear whatever we wanted. 

There are summery show-dresses hanging in the closet, silk and cotton, which is better than the cheap copies, though even so, when it gets muggy at the parties and galas and celebrations, you sweat inside then. 

_ No worry about your skin, though, _ said Uncle Lydol.  _ The spectacles some people make of themselves. Bare backs and shoulders, on the street and in public, and legs, not even stockings on them, no wonder those things happen. _ Things, the word he used when whatever it stood for was too distasteful or filthy or horrible to pass his lips. A successful life for him was one that avoided things, excluded things.  _ Such things do not happen to nice people. _ But we weren’t supposed to care about our complexions any more, he’d forgotten that. 

He began to cry, standing up there in front of us, in full view.  _ I’m doing my best, _ he said tugging his bracelet,  _ I’m trying to give you the best chance you can have. _ He blinked, the light was too strong for him,his mouth trembled, around his front teeth. Uncle Lydol pressed his hand over his mouth.  _ Don’t think it’s easy for me either, _ he said.

“We’re going into the city,” said my friend excitedly. She was older than me and full of energy and noise. “We’ll look at the nice clothes and go to the library.” 

There was no point trying to draw, that’s what I was doing, drawing in red paint on some piece of white armour; she wouldn’t allow it, like a tooka that crawls onto the page. 

“I’ll teach you how to look cute,” she said, “so the shopkeeps give you a sweet from the stalls.”

“Why would I need that,” I asked.

“Never too young to learn,” she said, and I laughed, because we all knew the stories of when the grown-up Jaiehs were only children, and tooka-eyes were a weapon. Healer Eerin always told us the funniest stories.

Is that how we lived then? But we lived as usual. Everyone does, most of the time. Whatever is going is as usual. Even this is as usual, now. Most people lived as usual by ignoring. Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance; you have to work at it.

Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you’d be boiled to death before you knew it. There were stories in the holonews, of course, corpses in ditches and far-flung warzones, blown to death or gunned down, but they were other Force Sensitives, other battalions. We knew fewer and fewer knights were coming home, but none of them were the ones we knew. The holo stories were like bad dreams to us, bad dreams dreamt by others. How awful, we would grieve into the Force, and they were, but they were awful without being real. They were too melodramatic, they had a dimension that was not the dimension of our lives.

We were the people who were not in the news. The rest of the Temple worked to keep it away from us. We lived in the blank spaces at the edges of the print. It gave us more freedom.

We lived in the gaps between the stories. We thought we’d be safe there.

From below, from the speeder bay, comes the sound of a speeder starting. It’s quieter in this area, there isn’t much traffic, you can hear close things like that very clearly. You could hear a shout in the neighbouring apartments through the windows, or a blaster-shot, if such noises were ever made here. Sometimes there are distant sirens.

I go to the window and sit on the window seat, which is too narrow for comfort, twirling my cuffs. There’s a hard little cushion on it, with a petit-point cover: FAITH in square print, surrounded by a wreath of lilies. FAITH is a faded blue, the leaves of the lilies a dingy green. This is a cushion once used elsewhere, worn but not enough to throw out. Somehow it’s been overlooked.

I can spend minutes, tens of minutes, running my eyes over the print: FAITH. It’s the only thing they’ve given me to read. If I were caught doing it, would it count? I didn’t put the cushion here myself.

The motor turns, and I lean forward, pulling the white curtain across my face like a veil. It’s semi-sheer, I can see through it. If I press my forehead against the glass and look down I will see the black Whirlwind pull out of the speeder-bay. 

It comes around the side of the building, and through the windscreen I see Nick and the Commander (not a real Commander; real Commanders are the ones from when I was child) without his hat on, so it isn’t a formal event they’re going to. His hair is grey. Silver, you might call it, if you were being kind. I don’t feel like being kind, un-Jedi as that may be. If I could lean out of the window, or throw something and time it right, I might be able to hit it.

An older Padawan, Mera, and I and some others, with paper bags filled with water. Water bombs, they were called. Leaning out over a balcony somewhere in the Temple, dropping them on the heads of the boys below. It was Mera’s idea. What were they trying to do? Climb up for something, the flag maybe. The speeder vanishes behind the next building.

I ought to feel hatred for this man. Or I ought not to feel it, but I should feel something that isn’t what I feel. What I feel is more complicated than that. I don’t know what to call it, I never learned. It isn’t love.

**Author's Note:**

> Talk to us in the comments, or find Grace on the tumblr @graaaaceeliz. We love to hear from you.


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